


Rift

by Topographical_Map_Of_Utah



Series: Look For The Force [6]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Bazey come back, Break Up, M/M, Oh Lord Is There Angst, Pre-Rogue One
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-04
Updated: 2017-02-11
Packaged: 2018-09-21 13:26:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9551006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Topographical_Map_Of_Utah/pseuds/Topographical_Map_Of_Utah
Summary: The strongest bonds can tear, and the hardest hearts can break.





	1. Chapter 1

There was a curl in Chirrut's lower lip, a twitching in his eye. Baze knew that he could smell it: the bones crumbling to ash, the fear splashed red across brick walls. It didn't take sight to understand the madness surrounding them. Jedha had fallen. The Empire had won. 

Their home was dust. 

"Chirrut, we have to go." Baze insisted, voice low under the carnage unfolding down the street from them, the explosions and screams that tainted the air and rattled his teeth. It was a miracle that they had made it this far, into an alley that Baze would know was familiar if given a moment to think about it. He had known the Imperial forces were coming, had heard swirls of rumours from pilgrims as they moved through the temple. The high priest insisted that they had nothing to fear, but just in case, Baze had stashed a speeder by the western gate, their only chance at escape. This seemed to be the perfect time to use it.

If only the man for whose sake Baze had done all this could understand that.

Baze had discarded his robes days ago, but even now Chirrut stood in the red and black that marked him as a Guardian, a target. His amulet glinted on his chest, a golden firebird being consumed in the flames around them. But it could not rise from ashes if the burning never stopped.

"I'm not leaving, Baze."

"And I'm not leaving you behind." Baze insisted. "Chirrut, even if you stay, there's not going to be anything left for you to protect." Yes, the city would stand, still. The takeover was more of an illness than an injury, a gradual eating away at the organs rather than a sudden blow. Jedha would die from the inside out over years, decades. That seemed a crueler death, somehow. "Please, Chirrut."

When Chirrut felt Baze's hand on his arm he drew back, hands curling into fists. "The most loyal of us all." he said coldly. "And now you run."

Baze searched in vain for something to say. It was not like him to be struck dumb, especially not around Chirrut. But something was different. The air around them was meant to be alive. Arguments, laughter, the hum of shared breath. Now it hung heavy, a barrier in itself. If Baze was not careful, did not ration his breaths and steady his heart, it would smother him, he was sure of it.

"There's no point in loyalty if it's only going to get you killed." he grumbled finally. "No point in dying for something that's already dead."

For the first time, Baze saw rage, feral and unhinged, flash across Chirrut's face. A moment later he was choking, pinned up against the wall with Chirrut's elbow thrust up under his chin. Chirrut was centimetres away from his face, the pulse of his breaths harsh and unforgiving as the desert sun.

"That's a coward's excuse. You are loyal to yourself, your own feelings. Nothing else." he spat. "You are weak, Baze Malbus."

"And you are blind to the truth, Chirrut Îmwe." Baze gasped out. "You won't survive this."

Baze did not mean the invasion itself. Chirrut might survive the battle, the carnage of a world ripping itself apart. But this state of fire and brimstone would not last forever. It would settle, stagnate. The Empire would cast its shadow over Jedha and bury it like a carcass in the dunes, leaving Chirrut to wade through the wasteland that remained. 

"No one survives this. War outlives the warrior, but without him all is lost." Chirrut's face softened and for a moment Baze remembered coarse sheets and a gentle touch, the tingle of salt on his lips. "We will not win. We will pass the torch. We will die."

"Stop it." Chirrut's words were too prophetic, spoken like simple truths. The sky was blue, and war would take Chirrut's life with a splash of red. The sun rose, and Baze would fall on a battlefield. 

They loved each other, and that love could do nothing for them.

When Chirrut released him Baze slid down the wall, inhaling with a sharp gasp as he crumpled on the stone. Chirrut had always had the advantage in hand to hand. Baze rubbed the red mark on his neck and coughed, watching Chirrut with the cautious eyes of hunted prey.

"For the record," he wheezed. "I'm still loyal to you."

"I know. That hasn't changed." Chirrut exhaled a sigh, the truth impossible to ignore. "Even if you do leave, that won't change. The Force will be with you, you know. Wherever you go."

"The Force..."  The word tasted foul in Baze's mouth. Rage bubbled up in him again and a snarl twisted the bloody lines of his face. "The Force is dead." he growled, voice foreign in his own ears. It was not a statement directed at Chirrut, but at the crumbling city walls, the ashen skies churning above them. The words were meant for the jagged bits of a universe that had never truly been whole, and the dead thing that claimed to have held it.

Lately Baze had walked hand in hand with death, the cold press of its fingertips constant and firm. They were like old friends, really. Although he did not know it as well as the Guardians who it had already taken, or the mother he had not said goodbye to. Even now she lay in the street, blaster gripped in her charred hand. She was but one of many lives wiped out like words on a slate, unimportant and forgotten, stars flickering out unmourned. If they had died, why not the binding power that held together the galaxy, too? It was fragments, shards. A shattered pane of glass on smooth black tile. There was no reason to it. There was no meaning. There was nothing at all that would not soon be destroyed. 

That must not happen to Chirrut.

For a moment he just stood, considering Baze's statement in his quiet, pensive way. Baze wanted him to yell, to curse. He wanted to see his own pain reflected on Chirrut's face. But there was only acceptance, and a peace in those pale blue eyes which Baze could not comprehend.

"I don't want this to happen to us, you know." Chirrut said finally. "But I can't make you stay, and you can't make me leave. That's the trouble when two stubborn people love each other, isn't it?" Laughing under his breath, Chirrut shouldered his staff and picked up his lightbow. "Neither is willing to listen to the other."

Baze just blinked, not quite understanding. Tell him that his heart didn't have to beat to keep him alive, and he would believe that before acknowledging this. Then Chirrut turned and smiled at the wall, as bright as the day they had met. "Come now, Bazey. At least say goodbye before you go."

"This is it, then." Baze realised, reaching out and entwining Chirrut's rough fingers in his. He was met with no resistance, so he held fast, a man stumbling blind through a sandstorm. "Will I ever see you again?"

His voice was frail and unsure, he knew. It was the voice of a lost child, wandering the streets with wet eyes and cracking skin. The voice of the blind, unwanted boy who Baze had picked out of the gutter all those years ago. And now the man that boy had become was leaving, and Baze could not understand how he had let this happen.

"If the Force wills it to be so." Chirrut said softly. He raised Baze's hand to his lips and pressed a kiss to the bloodied knuckles. It wasn't a promise, barely even a reassurance. It did nothing to soothe the pain twisting in Baze's stomach or quiet the voices shrieking in his mind. Their lives had been entwined for decades. Without Chirrut, Baze was sure he would unravel. So he sat very, very still, fraying at the edges as Chirrut's footsteps receded into the distance before becoming nothing but memory. For a moment Baze considered following him.

Instead he let go of the days and nights and the shadowy purple bits in between, the moments slipping through the cracks in his cupped hands like water. Every touch was discarded, every soft word made hard and then cast aside. As the memories slipped away the grip on his heart relaxed, but some things he could not forget. 

Snatches of their first conversation, the childish voices fluttering like injured birds in his mind. 

Chirrut's hand in his, the touch concealed beneath flowing black and red robes.

The words _I love you_ , whispered not so long ago on a warm summer night. 

It took a few minutes, but then all of that went, too.

When Baze opened his eyes there was nothing left but the throb of emptiness, the hollow ache of a rotten tooth. There was no pain, thank the stars, but there was no purpose, either. He got to his feet and stretched, feeling...old. Old and empty as the temple they had called home. He trudged through the streets, mechanically picking off whatever enemies he came across. There weren't many. Whatever resistance that had managed to organise had been cowed. Baze tried to be surprised, honestly, but he could not muster up emotions. Only facts made sense. So as each step pulled him further away from his past, he ran through a list in his mind, restricting his knowledge of the galaxy into simple, straightforward sentences.

Baze knew for a fact that he was thirty-three. He knew for a fact that he was bleeding from a gash in his cheek that would become a scar. He knew for a fact that he missed Chirrut. He knew for a fact that he was, for the first time, free to leave. 

So he did.


	2. Chapter 2

Seven years went by, each as indistinct and inconspicuous as raindrops dripping off an awning. Baze lived like that, too. A drop in a river, a grain of sand rolling down the side of a dune. He caused no ripples in galactic affairs, stirred up no trouble that was significant enough to be noted down. Yes, he was an assassin, but the galaxy was filled with them, a faceless, nondescript mass of blood money and hooded eyes. His travels skirted the Outer Rim, but always remained tethered by some invisible power that Baze refused to call the Force. At the same time, there was something drawing him out, something calling to him from the other side of the galaxy. And while the two callings warred within him, Baze simply denied them.

That is until one day something made that impossible. 

One day he was stalking through an alleyway in some trading post. A mining colony, he thought. But places blurred together in an indistinct mass, these days. Sounds, sights, none of them made any impression worth mentioning. At least, they hadn't until a pleading little mewl echoing off of the metal pipes above him awoke him from his stupor. He followed the sound and found a child sobbing on a street corner, grimy hands pressed to a thin blue face. Baze tried to move on, he really did, but that would feel wrong, somehow.

So, blood on his hands and a cannon strapped to his back, Baze set out, following the minimal instructions he got up and down winding streets, the child a warm lump in his arms. When he set her down - up the street from her building, to be sure of not being seen - the little one had smiled at him, and that big, innocent grin, lips soft around strange, translucent fangs, had broken him, had made him ache for something he had refused to even think about for so long. And as he walked away, listening to the exclamations from the child's parents, one word throbbed in his mind, holding all other thoughts hostage. A single word that would not let Baze rest until he pursued it. 

_Home._

Perhaps it was time to see if he still had one.

 

\---------- 

 

As far as Baze could tell, the streets of Jedha had not changed in all the time he had been gone. He was convinced that even the little hills of sand that dusted the doorsteps had laid undisturbed for the whole of his absence. It all provoked a sense of yearning for the past, a dry nostalgia he knew would never be satisfied. Even so, it was uncanny how timeless this place felt. Baze could be seven, tasting porridge on his lips and trying to squirm away from his mother's hand. He could be thirteen again, running through the streets like a stray dog, mangy and wild. He could be five years old, turning an unfamiliar corner and coming across the ragged catalyst who would set his world alight.

That first time he had come across Chirrut on the street, Baze had felt something stirring in his chest, a need to protect, to preserve. That same instinct burned in him again, only less like a flame and more like a coal buried deep in a stove, reigniting with the reintroduction of a spark. For a moment Baze hovered, watching Chirrut with caution. He was meditating in an abandoned doorway on an empty street. He was perhaps a little leaner, a little coarser. In better state than Baze, definitely. But the important thing was that he was alive, and that meant that there was no turning back for Baze. 

"Are you going to say hello or not, Bazey?"

Baze blinked and realised that at some point Chirrut had turned, eyes seeming to rest right on Baze's heart. Baze held his breath as Chirrut stepped carefully towards him, not bothering with his staff, honing in on Baze like a beacon. He had seen rolling seas, towering mountains, echoing caverns, glittering cities, his own blood pooling red on the street. None of that struck him as hard as the simplicity of this. The blue of Chirrut's eyes was a world all its own, as real as the ones Baze had spent so much time searching. 

"Chirrut..." The words died as Chirrut cupped Baze's face in his broad hands, thumbs stroking wondrously over the ridges of Baze's cheekbones.

Tender as it was, the touch sent a chill down Baze's spine, fear like rainwater trickling over his skin. Knowing that Chirrut couldn't see him was no comfort. Touch was enough to know that he was a different man. His pockmarked face was rough with a short beard he had grown to cover his scars, but Chirrut's fingertips seemed to catch on each and every uneven patch, almost as though he were seeking them out, reminding Baze of how the years had changed him - damaged him, as he put it. 

Chirrut didn't seem to think that, though.

"It is you." Chirrut smiled and Baze let his forehead drop against his neck in relief. He was struck first with the feeling of his heartbeat, the rhythm sure and strong. Chirrut was real. He was here. Baze had found him again.

"Don't go crying on me, now." Chirrut teased, pulling away and taking Baze by the hand. "Come on. We have much to talk about." 

"I wasn't crying..." Baze mumbled ruefully as he followed Chirrut down the street, matching his purposeful, straight-backed stride. The winding path took them deep into the city, but when Baze looked up he found that he knew exactly where Chirrut had taken him. "I remember this place. Your old hiding spot." he realised.

"Do you? No one else does. That's why I live here." Chirrut laughed. "You remember the first time I came here with you, don't you?" 

"Yes," How could Baze forget their inexperienced hands and eager lips, the warmth of a first kiss that held the promise of many more. Chirrut made it sound like it had all happened the day before, that between then and now time had constricted or stalled, separating them from the past by seconds rather than decades.

"Baze? It's unkind to go quiet on a blind man, you know..."

"It's been seven years, Chirrut." The reminder made Baze's heart ache. "We haven't seen each other in seven years, and you're acting as though I stepped out for some air."

"That you did. I like to think you've caught your breath, now." Chirrut teased, feeling his way up the stairs, the tired steps creaking beneath his feet. When he reached the top he cocked his head and tapped his staff against the floor with an inviting, inexplicable smile on his face; a smile Baze was sure meant home. "What's wrong, Bazey? Aren't you coming up?"

"Hm?" Baze realised he hadn't moved from the doorway, one heavy foot still poised above the first step. With a deep breath he followed Chirrut, struggling to keep a steady pace and to not simply run after him. Although really, could you blame him for being eager?

 

\---------

 

The sun dipped below the horizon before the conversation stalled between them. For hours their words floated over steaming mugs and a makeshift tablecloth, stories lilting like birds in the dark little room. Baze recalled what misadventures he could, and Chirrut brought him up to date with the situation in Jedha: the Kyber mines and Imperial rule. It was a sorry state of affairs, but one that they had all seemed to be adjusted to, if begrudgingly.

Even Chirrut managed well enough. He lived tolerably; scavenging what he needed, fighting when he had to, helping who he could. Baze found out that his own desertion was by no means unique. Many of their brothers and sisters had scattered across the galaxy, searching for new faiths, new homes. But some remained, undeterred by the bright red targets on their backs or the dead temple looming over them. 

And looking at the life Chirrut had managed to eke out for himself, here in a half-empty shrine that smelled of incense and old wood, cocooned in a city that was slowly tearing itself to shreds, Baze could not understand why this was the life he had chosen.

"Chirrut, do you ever think..." Baze tapped his spoon on the side of the table, framing the next sentence carefully. "There are other worlds out there, remember? Other temples, other orders. You could follow your faith somewhere else, couldn't you? Why stay here?" 

"Because this is where I belong." Chirrut laughed. He was searching the table for his tea and Baze gently nudged it towards him. He had forgotten to mention that he had placed it on the opposite side of Chirrut's bowl after filling it. Seems as though he would have to get back in the habit of putting things back where he found them. "And I'm not sure if you've noticed, but I _am_ blind. Navigating someplace new without that clever little device of yours would be a nightmare..."

"Wait, what happened to my echo-box? Did you break it again?" As an answer Chirrut smiled and got to his feet, dusting off his robes and humming as he felt along the shelves nailed into the wall. Baze found the transmitter first, tucked among a pile of scrolls Chirrut had somehow salvaged as the Temple was ransacked. Baze had scolded him for it then, but now, with the safe, familiar smell of parchment hanging in the air, he kept his mouth shut.

"Only a month or so ago. And it wasn't me. Just some fool with an eager trigger finger." Baze grunted and diverted his attention to poking at the odds and ends sticking out of the burnt casing. It would be an easy fix, as far as he could see. "Hard not to get caught in the crossfire, when you live in a war zone." Chirrut snorted and shoved Baze onto the bed, flopping down beside him on the worn out quilts with a satisfied sigh. "It's quiet in here, at the very least."

"It is." Baze agreed. For the moment he set aside his project and stretched, watching the rise and fall of Chirrut's breaths beneath his heavy robes. "I've missed the quiet."

"And I've missed you." Chirrut said softly. He reached up and Baze took him by the hand, taking a moment to explore the calloused fingertips and cracked nails, the marks of days and nights spent training for a battle that Chirrut seemed to know was coming. Then all those thoughts were cast aside as Chirrut pulled him down into a soft, easy kiss. Baze took a deep breath and closed his eyes, allowing Chirrut to take the lead.

It was a wonder they had controlled themselves for this long, really.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> welp one more chapter that's probs gonna be a bunch of make up sex

**Author's Note:**

> why does the canon keep hurting me with facts i don't want or need. Also why tf is this info in the damn sticker encyclopedia like "oh hey look at that little bitty death star hold up THE SPACE HUSBANDS DIVORCED???"


End file.
